99% of the time WASM is being used right now it isn't being used to manipulate the DOM, and last time I checked the actual DOM bindings for WASM didn't really work.
There was no mention of HTML and right now no one is using WASM for html, so I assumed GP meant normal WASM type stuff, not theoretical WASM-dom bindings that I haven't seen anyone use yet.
> 99% of the time WASM is being used right now it isn't being used to manipulate the DOM
Almost certainly. I would expect that 50% of WASM being used right now is outside of the browser entirely. Cloudflare Workers, for example. Same goes for Javascript.
Regardless, I expect the real serious answer is that writing raw WASM isn't particularly ergonomic. You could do it if you had to, but it is very much designed to be a compiler target. The OP was no doubt alluding to Javascript providing better developer ergonomics much like virtual DOM solutions have done over 'raw' DOM manipulation.
Reading the article he would have realized that Svelte offers much the same without a virtual DOM, and that the headline refers to that, but when was the last time anyone on HN read the article?
> The OP was no doubt alluding to Javascript providing better developer ergonomics much like virtual DOM solutions have done over 'raw' DOM manipulation.
Were they? Alternative interpretations abound. "Raw WASM" implies that they were sarcastically saying the virtual DOM makes things a whole lot easier, and if all you care about is performance you might as well hand write a bunch of assembly.
Another interpretation would be that the whole DOM is inefficient, so you might as well transpile some kind of native toolkit to a WASM engine.
There are a lot of different interpretations for that pithy sentence. Does raw mean written by hand or does it mean not using DOM bindings?
